Dr. Rae: [00:00:00] Hey, Peter, you know, you've done a lot of things in your life, but have you ever held a beaver in your hands?
Peter: [00:00:05] I did a very small beaver. I'm happy to report it didn't feel anything. I thought it was going to feel like. How about you? I understand you had an adult.
Dr. Rae: [00:00:15] So because of Wild Kingdom, I got my hands on a beaver with the guidance of experts. And I have to say, you know, I'm a bona fide wildlife ecologist. And yet, before this experience, I really didn't know much about beavers. All I knew was the stuff they teach you in elementary school, which is mostly about beavers of the past. Right? It's mostly about the fur trade from the 17th and 1800s and how it decimated beaver populations because their fur was so valuable to Europeans. But you don't really learn about beavers of the present in school, at least not when I was in school. So, I had this, like many years-long gap in Beaver information. Then Wild Kingdom came along, and before I knew it, I had my hands on a beaver.
Peter: [00:00:57] And they are such an interesting animal. I think people are going to learn more about beavers in this podcast than they ever imagined.
Dr. Rae: [00:01:07] I'm wildlife ecologist Dr. Rae Wynn Grant.
Peter: [00:01:10] And I'm wildlife expert and educator Peter Gros. And this is Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom the Podcast, Episode 7: Our Ecosystem Engineers.
Dr. Rae: [00:01:30] Obviously, we get excited about all animals, but I think I speak for both of us when I say that some of our favorite experiences with wildlife happen when we encounter keystone species, that is, species that have a massive impact on their ecosystem.
Peter: [00:01:46] Like the beavers up in Washington state when we were shooting our episode for Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom: Protecting the Wild. It was amazing to see the trickle-down effect of beavers and their dams.
Dr. Rae: [00:01:59] Especially when I went out in the field with wildlife biologist Molly Alves. At that time, she was working with the Indigenous Tulalip Tribe, who've been at the forefront of reviving salmon habitat in the Pacific Northwest.
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Dr. Rae: [00:02:12] What do you have to do with all of this?
Molly Aves: [00:02:13] I managed the Tulalip Beaver project. It's a beaver relocation program that we started for the purposes of partnering with Beavers to restore and create salmon habitat salmon.
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Dr. Rae: [00:02:25] Molly talks about beavers with so much passion. I just love how she says that for the Tulalip Beaver Project, they partner with beavers [laughs] cause, in her mind, it's not a human project for beavers. They're actually a team.
Peter: [00:02:38] But I found it surprising that, unlike some other guests we've had on the show, she didn't necessarily have a childhood love of the animal that's become the focus of her work.
Molly Alves: [00:02:50] My first notable experience that I remember, like interacting with a beaver, was when I was in college in Vermont. I had a summer internship, and part of that internship was snorkeling to remove aquatic invasive species. And I was just in the pond removing these plants. And I just see this, like a dark figure coming through the weeds. And in the moment, like I had no idea what I was looking at. I just knew that I was terrified [laughs]. And I came in and it took me a while to figure out it was a beaver. It did come up to the surface later, and tail slapped at me. That's the telltale sign: you're in beaver habitat. But yeah, that was my first experience, and I definitely didn't want to be in water with them in a vulnerable position.
Dr. Rae: [00:03:42] There wasn't, like, an obvious sign that you would grow up to be a beaver biologist.
Molly Alves: [00:03:48] Absolutely not. I knew next to nothing about beavers before I moved across the country for this job, and that's something that I love to joke about. As I've just become ingrained in the Beaver management community, no one grew up just with this desire to work with beavers. Everyone kind of ended up here accidentally because of a passion in something else that it turns out beavers have a positive impact on. So, I moved out here from Rhode Island right after I finished my undergraduate degree at the University of Vermont, and the thing that drew me to this position was not only being able to support a tribal organization, but they have such a different way of managing wildlife and landscapes. Then, kind of Western science does. And that really appeals to me morally. But I also would have the opportunity to work with a variety of species a lot of wildlife jobs. You're kind of pigeonholed into working with a single species. And I would get to work with elk and mountain goats and beavers, and here we are now, and I'm pretty much exclusively working with beavers because they've just, like, totally taken over my passion.
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Dr. Rae: [00:05:00] At one point, it was estimated that there were some four hundred million beavers in North America. But when European settlers arrived, they've decimated the population because beavers were hunted for their pelts. This had a huge impact on the environment, as less beavers meant fewer beaver dams, and then less dams meant fewer wetlands for fish and other wildlife to flourish. And nowadays, beavers are still at risk of being killed because they're often seen as a nuisance. But the Tulalip Beaver Project uses non-lethal techniques and safely traps beavers in urban and suburban areas, and then relocates them to U.S. Forest Service land.
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Molly Alves: [00:05:42] So, you know, beavers build these dams that impound water, they create ponds and wetlands and add diversity in the layout of creeks and obviously in urban areas. That can be a problem because we don't leave a lot of space for nature to expand in our urban areas. So, it can have a pretty major effect. And on the opposite side, it can have an enormous effect where we're replacing these animals. And so, we use gain cameras to monitor these sites. And before we put beavers there, we really don't get a lot of activity on the cameras. And then we place a family. We continue to monitor with gain cameras. And you have everything using the habitat that these beavers create. We have cougars and bobcats crossing the dams and bears swimming in the ponds, and we have otters and all kinds of birds, and it's just incredible to see these kinds of localized explosions of biodiversity just because these beavers built a dam.
Dr. Rae: [00:06:48]: I love that. And now, can you give us some background on this project and what is the project trying to solve?
Molly Alves: [00:06:55] Yeah. So this project came about in around 2013, and it was after some Tulalip tribal members and elders had attended a big salmon restoration conference, and they were trying to think up creative ways to address salmon decline on the landscape scale and in a more financially responsible way because there's so many salmon restoration projects happening in the northwest and millions upon millions of dollars being dumped into that, and it's really just to put stuff, manmade stuff, into a stream to restore habitat. And we wanted to think of how can we use, now referred to as nature-based solution that is financially reasonable and can continue to restore beyond the time that we spend at that particular location? And beavers are really just the perfect solution.
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The hope eventually of this program is to essentially put ourselves out of business, because we've established so many productive beaver colonies in the area, and it's self-sustaining with annual reproduction of those animals. So, we got to work trying to figure out where to put these beavers. And we spent about a year doing a study of the habitat and the watershed surrounding the reservation. And what we found was that around seventy-five percent of the suitable habitat within those higher elevation areas were unoccupied, and we know that beavers used to be widespread in Washington. And these days, they're mostly, at least in western Washington, congregate in the urban and suburban areas. And the reason for that is really culverts. Beavers love road culverts.
Dr. Rae: [00:08:40] Wait, what is a road culvert?
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Molly Alves: [00:08:43] Where a road crosses a creek, there is, I guess, a metal tube [laughs]. I don't know how to explain a culvert in layman's terms. But a tube that goes through that road prism that allows the stream to pass through. And when beavers see a culvert, they basically see an intact dam with a hole in it that is very easy for them to plug. And so it's less effort for maximum gain, I suppose, from their perspective. But when they plug culverts, they can flood out private properties. They can flood out roads, which is a big issue. They can cause damage to human infrastructure. And that's why there's often a negative perception of beavers. And so, this program is not just about reducing the lethal management of beavers in these cases but also about educating the public on why it's important to keep these animals alive.
Dr. Rae: [00:09:37] So I want to bring it back a second to salmon because again, you know, we're talking about beavers. But in terms of the Tulalip project, the salmon is a big part of this, right? Trying to restore salmon populations. So, can you speak a bit to the importance of salmon for the Tulalip Tribes from a cultural perspective?
Molly Alves: [00:09:56] Yeah, I would say that salmon are one of, if not the most culturally and subsistence-based important resources for the tribes. And I mean, on an ecological basis, I mean, salmon support everything, you know, from the charismatic megafauna like the bears that you work with and love to bald eagles. They also really support forest health as a whole by depositing these nutrients that support the growth of our trees. Yeah, I mean, it would be chaos if we were to lose the salmon. So, I think it's great that there are so many folks thinking about how to make them persist. And I'm glad that people are starting to get on board with the idea of beavers as being a large piece of that solution.
Peter: [00:10:45] Can you tell me a little bit about the very first beaver that you relocated?
Molly Alves: [00:10:50] I remember the excitement of having successfully trapped a beaver. I had previously done small mammal trapping and mis-netting for birds and bats, but I had never trapped a beaver before, and so, I was mostly just impressed that it worked [laughs]. And then I that first family we ever captured, I think there were seven beavers in that family, and it was like we caught the first one, and then it was just night after night we kept catching them, and I was just amazed that we were able to, I guess, outsmart them, because beavers are much more clever than we give them credit for. You really have to trick them into swimming into your traps. So it was just amazing to not just catch the first beaver but be able to capture its entire family, which is really one of the cornerstones of our program is we're trying to capture and relocate entire family groups together because beavers form very tight-knit familial bonds, and if you separate them, it's likely that they're not going to stay where you put them. And so, we want to keep those productive families intact so that we can incentivize them to stay in the location that we hope for them to restore.
Dr. Rae: [00:12:04] So I imagine we have a lot of listeners who, when they think of wildlife conservation, right? They think of like not trapping animals. They think of kind of the opposite of that, like, “We're not going to, like, try to lure them into traps and take them somewhere; we're going to try to, like, let them be free in the place where they are” So because this project is a huge part of conservation beavers and salmon, but it involves trapping them like, can you talk about it step by step?
Molly Alves: [00:12:33] Yeah. The logistics are a nightmare [laughs]. You know, a lot of people are just like, “Oh, cute beavers. They're cuddly. They're really cute”. But these are highly mobile, wild animals with really big teeth [laughs] and so trapping has to be done with the utmost care. But the first step is receiving a call, typically from a very distressed landowner that. And rightfully so. You know, something that I've learned through this job is seeing both sides of the equation, like well, obviously, I care about the animal welfare. I can also commiserate with the landowners who have had a tree fall on their roof because a beaver chewed on it, or their backyard or their basement is flooded, or they can't access their driveway because of flooding due to beaver damming. These are real problems that we need to find long-term solutions for. So, we receive a call, and first thing we do is just go out and do a site visit. And that's mostly to get the lay of the land. First and foremost, see if beavers are the actual problem.
Dr. Rae: [00:13:39]: You're a detective also?
Molly Alves: [00:13:42] Yes [laughs] exactly. And then we figure out can this problem be solved using co-existence techniques? And so, we work with an amazing nonprofit here in Seattle called “Beavers Northwest” that specializes in coexistence techniques like Beaver deceivers and pond levelers, which is essentially a device that you can put through a beaver dam. But it helps you maintain the water level above that dam to a certain height so that beavers can't surpass that and cause flooding. So, we always try to work with landowners to choose the coexistence option because it is a long-term solution to a beaver problem. The first thing I always tell landowners is trapping and relocation are a short-term solution to what is probably going to be a long-term issue for them because what we're doing when we're removing those beavers is creating prime open habitat for the next beaver family that swims along.
Peter: [00:14:42] Now, you two got to spend a lot of time together filming. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the behind-the-scenes things that happen while you're there?
Molly Alves: [00:14:49] I think, honestly, my favorite part of the whole day was seeing Rae's face when we got to the trap site and saw that we had captured a beaver, and I knew that it was the first beaver she had ever seen and gotten a chance to interact with.
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Molly Alves: [00:15:03] Can you see?
Dr. Rae: [00:15:04] Oh, I just saw some movement.
Molly Alves: [00:15:09] Morning, I know.
Dr. Rae: [00:15:12] Hi, I bet your dam was looking really good. We just had to do it somewhere else. Somewhere a little more wild.
Molly Alves: [00:15:18] Yes, exactly.
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Molly Alves: I just love that excitement. When we bring people out and they're seeing this animal up close. I mean, first off, most people don't really recognize how large beavers are. You know, we've got newborn beavers that are as little as five pounds, and then we've caught large females that are like sixty-five pounds. I mean, these are large, powerful animals. I love seeing the shock on people's faces when we pull out like a fifty-pound beaver. And they're like, ‘Whoa.”
Peter [00:15:48] That's great [laughs].
Dr. Rae: [00:15:49] After Molly and her team trapped the Beavers, they bring them back to the salmon hatchery where the beavers are housed until their entire families are caught and they can be relocated together. At the hatchery, Molly got me doing some data collection on the beavers, like getting hair samples and DNA. Now, I've done this kind of thing before and field work with bears, but not quite like this.
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Dr. Rae: I just have to hold tight yeah?
Molly Alves: [00:16:13] One. Two. Three. So, what I'm doing right now is just kind of putting gentle pressure on its abdomen to try and express one of its glands. And basically, depending on what comes out of those glands, we can tell if it's a male or a female. We're going to give it a sniff.
Dr. Rae: [00:16:35] In the name of science.
Molly Alves: [00:16:37] It's all for science.
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Molly Alves: So, a fun fact about beavers is that just looking at a beaver, you cannot tell if it's a male or female. They look completely identical. And so beavers have a cloaca. And inside this cloaca, they have two castor glands. And castor is a liquid that beavers secrete either to attract a mate or to mark their territory. And so essentially, what we need to do when we capture these beavers is extract a sample of that castor. And based on the color, scent, and viscosity of the liquid, we can determine if it's a male or a female beaver.
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Molly Alves: [00:17:23] You're going to let me know if that smells like motor oil or funky cheese.
Dr. Rae: [00:17:27]: I'm going with cheese. It's cheese?
Molly Alves: [00:17:31] It's a girl.
Dr. Rae: [00:17:31] Wow, what a process.
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Dr. Rae: [00:17:35] Yeah, that's what it is. It's like you go through this huge process, and then you're like, now that we have some of this, like, secretion, this liquid that has come out of the gland, we still don't know if it's male or female. We have to smell it.
Peter: [00:17:49] I don't know how to follow this with the question. I'm kind of at a loss here. But I guess I'll ask, but what have you learned about yourself through working with beavers all this time?
Molly Alves: [00:17:58] I would say that I have learned, one how to communicate effectively with people with different perspectives than my own. You know, you don't want to, like, push like beavers are the solution or the answer. You must love them, like, I tried to appeal to a person's interest, because the amazing thing about beavers is that more likely than not, they have a solution for something that you care about, whether it's salmon, whether it's access to fresh water, whether it's protection on the landscape from wildfires. That's something a lot of people in the West can get behind. Something that you care about Beaver support. Even if you're, you know, a hunter or a fisherman, you know, beavers create waterfowl habitat. They create forage for deer and elk. So that's something that has been a big learning process coming from, like the wildlife advocacy side and thinking, trying to think what do other people care about? Like it's not what I care about, which is the beavers. It's helping connect these animals to something that is important to them.
Peter: [00:19:08] One of the pieces of data that I think we like to share for listeners is, how is the Tulalip Beaver project impacted salmon? Is it seem to be working? Are their populations improving? Are they doing better? Since the project started?
Molly Alves: [00:19:22] We have been confined to United States Forest Service land for the past ten years, and we're reaching a point where the vast majority of the site's nearly thirty sites that we've been monitoring since 2014 now have active beaver populations thriving in them. And so, we're getting to this awesome point where we're running out of places to put them in this area, which is wonderful. But also we still have a need to have places to put beavers, because we would much rather expand our geographic area to include more lands to put beavers on rather than reverting to, you know, before our project, it was pretty much if you had a beaver problem on your property, you called a trapper, and they came and euthanized those animals. And so that's why we're really starting to push coexistence techniques because that is going to be the future of long-term beaver management. Absolutely.
Dr. Rae: [00:20:20] So okay, just a bit of advice. Like we're almost near the end of the interview. And because you work with a species that can be by some considered a pest, what kind of advice might you give?
Molly Alves: [00:20:33] Yeah, I think the thing that I always tell people is, you know, if a beaver shows up in your backyard, that's really cool. I think the more that you can understand and respect an animal rather than fear it, the better that we allow people to manage that species. Well, there's so many beavers in the city parks in Seattle. I encourage people to go out at dusk and just sit near the water and just observe.
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I just want to try and open people's eyes to, you know, there's a beaver on my property. Well, what else might there be on my property now that these beavers showed up? You know, observe the changes if there's space to allow the beavers to stay. You're going to see some pretty incredible changes to that habitat. And, you know, if you like bird watching, birds will show up. If you like fishing, fish will show up. You know, everything relies on that habitat. And it's a wildlife viewer's dream.
Peter: [00:21:31] It's such an incredible beaver ambassador.
Molly Alves: [00:21:34] Thank you.
Dr. Rae: [00:21:35] Agreed. You have been awesome to work with on camera. You're an incredible podcast guest, and we're just, like, big fans of you, so just keep up the great work.
Molly Alves: [00:21:45] Well, likewise.
Peter: [00:21:46] Absolutely. I can't thank you enough. And I think there's an awful lot of beavers who like to thank you as well, Molly.
Molly Alves: [00:21:52] Thank you. Well, I like to thank the beavers because it's really them that's doing the work.
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Peter: [00:22:00] Before we said goodbye to Molly, we got the chance to get some beaver facts from her.
Dr. Rae: [00:22:05] How long does it take a beaver to build a dam?
Molly Alves: [00:22:07] If you have a motivated family, they can do that overnight.
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Peter: [00:22:13] What is the most unusual object that's been found in a beaver dam?
Molly Alves: [00:22:17] Oh, I've found canoe paddles. I've found a lot of tires. You know, unfortunately, like, the sad reality is a lot of trash. But, yeah, canoe paddle was just the funniest one. We were just making up all these stories of, like, what happened to the canoer here? And is he okay?
Dr. Rae: [00:22:41] How many beavers can fit in a lodge?
Molly Alves: [00:22:44] Depends on how big the lodges. [laughs]I think the largest beaver family we've captured was eleven animals. That's relatively unusual. You know, a typical beaver family structure is: You have the mated pair of mom and dad, and then they will reproduce annually, anywhere from one to four kids.
Peter: [00:23:05] Just how sharp are their teeth? And, like, what could they better chew through? For instance, how large of a tree can they chew through?
Molly Alves: [00:23:12] Oh, yeah. I mean, when there's a will, there's a way. They can chew through anything. I mean, they're so. Fun fact about beaver teeth is they are coated with iron, and so they're incredibly strong. And that's why they have that orange hue to them. But their teeth are designed to cut through wood to fell trees and then essentially shave the bark off of those trees, which is where they get their, their food and their nutrients from. And so, yeah, I always like to instill a healthy amount of fear in my staff when I'm teaching them how to work with beavers. I'm like, think about your fingers, and then think about how strong a tree is. You don't want to find out what a beaver is capable of.
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[MUSIC IN]
Peter: [00:24:04] Time and time again, we're showing just how connected the natural world is. No matter how small or seemingly insignificant, we all have an impact on the world around us. Beavers are an example of the importance of maintaining a healthy and balanced ecosystem by working with beavers. We can help other species like salmon thrive and ensure magical moments in the wild kingdom for future generations.
Dr. Rae: [00:24:33] Join us next week when we hear from Emma Lachance Linklater about her time living on a small island, helping to restore historical nesting sites for one of the cutest seabirds around. The puffin.
Emma Lachance Linklater: [00:24:46] It is treeless, rocky, perhaps a bit severe looking, but it's a natural home for the seabirds. They cover this island in just a cloud almost, that's constantly moving around and making noise. I had people compare it to the streets of New York City. It's really an island that never sleeps.
Dr. Rae: [00:25:10] That's next time on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, the podcast.
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Peter: [00:25:27] Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom: The podcast is a production of Pineapple Street Studios and Mutual of Omaha.
Dr. Rae: [00:25:35] Our senior producer is Steven Key.
Producers are Xandra Ellin and Jenny Van Soelen.
Associate producer is Lisa Cerda.
Editor is Darby Maloney.
Executive producers are Barri Finkel, Gabrielle Lewis, and Jen Wulf.
Pineapple's head of sound and engineering is Raj Makhija, Senior audio engineers are Marina Paiz, Davy Sumner, Javi Cruces, and Pedro Alvira. Additional engineering by Rob Miller and Jason Richards.
This episode was mixed by Davy Sumner.
Peter: [00:26:09] Production. Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound and Hearst Media Production Group.
Dr. Rae: [00:26:13] Episode clips courtesy of Hearst Media Production Group.
Fact-checking by Justine Daum.
Marketing and promotion by Emily Poeschl.
This podcast is hosted by me, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant
Peter: [00:26:26] And me, Peter Gross. A special thanks to Katelyn Williams, Sophie Radmilovich, and Stephanie Diaz
Dr. Rae: [00:26:32] Today's episode is based on the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom series created by Don Meier.
Our next episode will be out in a week.
Peter [00:26:40] Make sure you listen on the Audacy app or wherever you get your podcasts.
